that hath a cause to be heard to morrow in which his life or honour is concerned cannot forget it A wretch that is condemned to die to morrow cannot forget it And yet poor sinners that are continually uncertain to live an hour and certain speedily to see the Majesty of the Lord to their unconceivable joy or terrour as sure as now they live on earth can forget these things for which they have their memory and which one would think should drown the matters of this world as the report of a Canon doth a whisper or as the Sun obscureth the poorest glow-worm O wonderful stupidity of an unrenewed soul O wonderful folly and distractedness of the ungodly That ever men can forget I say again that they can forget eternal joy eternal woe and the eternal God and the place of their eternal unchangeable abode when they stand even at the door and are passing in and there is but the thin vail of flesh between them and that amazing sight that eternal gulf and they are daily dying and even stepping in O could you keep your honours here for ever could you ever wear that gay attire and gratifie your flesh with meats and drinks and sports and lusts could you ever keep your rule and dignity or your earthly life in any state you had some little poor excuse for not remembring the eternal things as a man hath that preferreth his candle before the Sun But when death is near and inexorable and you are sure to die as you are sure you live when every man of you that sitteth in these seats to day can say I must shortly be in another world where all the pomp and pleasure of this world will be forgotten or remembred but as my sin and folly one would think it were impossible for any of you to be ungodly and to Remember the trifles and nothings of the world while you forget that everlasting All whose reality necessity magnitude excellency concernment and duration are such as should take up all the powers of your souls and continually command the service and attendance of your thoughts against all Seekers and contemptible competitors whatsover But alas though you have the greatest helps in subserviency to these commanding objects yet will you not Remember the matters which alone deserve remembrance Sometimes the Preachers of the Gospel do call on you to Remember to Remember your God your souls your Saviour your ends and everlasting state and to remember your misdoings that you may loath your selves and in Returning may find life But some either scorn them or quarrel with them or sleep under their most serious and importunate solicitations or carelesly and stupidly give them the hearing as if they spoke but words of course or treated about uncertain things and spoke not to them from the God of heaven and about the things that every man of you shall very shortly see or feel Sometime you are called on by the voice of conscience within to remember the unreasonableness and evil of your wayes but conscience is silenced because it will not be conformable to your lusts But little do you think what a part your too-late-awakened conscience hath yet to play if you give it not a more sober hearing in time Sometime the voice of common calamities and National or local judgements do call on you to remember the evil of your wayes But that which is spoken to all or many doth seem to most of them as spoken unto none Sometime the voice of particular judgements seizing upon your families persons or estates doth call on you to remember the evil of your wayes And one would think the rod should make you hear And yet you most disregardfully go on or are only frightened into a few good purposes and promises that die when health and prosperity revive Sometime God joyneth all these together and pleadeth both by word and rod and addeth also the inward pleadings of his Spirit He sets your sins in order before you Psal. 50. 21. and expostulateth with you the cause of his abused love despised Soveraignty and provoked Justice and asketh the poor sinner Hast thou done well to waste thy life in vanity to serve thy flesh to forget thy God thy soul thy happiness and to thrust his service into corners and give him but the odious leavings of the flesh But these pleas of God cannot be heard O horrible impiety by his own creatures by reasonable creatures that would scorn to be called fools or mad men the God of heaven cannot be heard The brutish passionate furious sinners will not Remember They will not Remember what they have done and with whom it is that they have to do and what God thinks and saith of men in their condition and whither it is that the flesh will lead them and what will be the fruit and end of all their lusts and vanities and how they will look back on all at last and whether an holy or a sensual life will be sweetest to a dying man and what judgement it is that they will all be of in the controversie between the flesh and spirit at the later end Though they have life and time and reason for these uses we cannot entreate them to consider of these things in time If our lives lay on it as their salvation which is more lyeth on it we cannot intreate them If we should kneel to them and with tears beseech them but once a day or once a week to bestow one hour in serious consideration of their latter end and the everlasting state of Saints and sinners and of the equity of the holy wayes of God and the iniquity of their own we cannot prevail with them Till the God of heaven doth over-rule them we cannot prevail The witness that we are forc't to bear is sad It is sad to us but it will be sadder to these rebels that shall one day know that God will not be out-faced and that they may sooner shake the stable earth and darken the Sun by their reproaches then out-brave the Judge of all the world or by all their cavils wranglings or scorns escape the hands of his revenging Justice But if ever the Lord will save these souls he will bring their misdoings to their remembrance He will make them think of that which they were so loth to think on You cannot now abide these troubling and severe meditations The thoughts of God and Heaven and Hell the thoughts of your sins and of your duties are melancholly unwelcome thoughts to you But O that you could foreknow the thoughts that you shall have of all these things Even the proudest scornful hardened sinner that heareth me this day shall shortly have such a Remembrance as will make him wonder at his present blockishness O when the unresistible power of heaven shall open all your sins before you and command you to remember them and to remember the time and place and persons and all the circumstances of them What a
and only sin and the neglect of Christ and holiness that can undo you Look therefore upon sin as you should look on that which would cast you into hell and is daily undermining all your hopes O that that this Honourable Assembly could know it in some measure as it shall be shortly known and judg of it as men do when time is past and delusions vanished and all men are awakened from their fleshly dreams and their naked souls have seen the Lord O then what Laws would you make against sin How speedily would you joyn your strength against it as against the only enemy of our peace and as against a fire in your houses or a plague that were broken out upon the City where you are O then how zealously would you all concurre to promote the interest of Holiness in the Land and studiously encourage the servants of the Lord How severely would you deal with those that by making a mock of Godliness do hinder the salvation of the peoples souls How carefully would you help the Labourers that are sent to guid men in the holy path and your selves would go before the Nation as an example of penitent self-loathing for your sins and hearty conversion to the Lord Is this your duty now or is it not If you cannot deny it I warn you from the Lord do not neglect it and do not by your disobedience to a convinced conscience prepare for a tormenting conscience If you know your Masters will and do it not you shall be beaten with many stripes And your publike capacity and work doth make your Repentance and holiness needfull to others as well as to your selves Had we none to govern us but such as entirely subject themselves to the government of Christ and none to make us Laws but such as have his Law transcribed upon their hearts O what a happy people should we be Men are unlikely to make strckt Laws against the vices which they love and live in or if they make them they are more unlikely to execute them We can expect no great help against drunkenness swearing gaming filthiness and prophaneness from men that love these abominations so well as that they will rather part with God and their salvation then they will let them go All men are born with a serpentine malice and emnity against the seed of Christ which is rooted in their very natures Custome in sin encreaseth this to more malignity and it is only renewing grace that doth overcome it If therefore there should be any among our Rulers that are not cured of this mortall malady what friendship can be expected from them to the cause and servants of the Lord If you are all the children of God your selves and Heaven be your end and holiness your delight and business it will then be your principall care to encourage it and help the people to the happiness that you have found your selves But if in any the originall increased enmity to God and godliness prevail we can expect no better ordinarily from such then that they oppose the holiness which they hate and do their worst to make us miserable But woe to him that striveth against his Maker Shall the thorns and bryers be set in battail against the consuming fire and prevail Isa. 27. 4 5. Oh therefore for the Nations sake begin at home and cast away the sins which you would have the Nation cast away All men can say that Ministers must teach by their lives as well as by their doctrines and woe to them that do not And must not Magistrates as well govern by their lives as by their Laws Will you make Laws which you would not have men obey Or would you have the people to be better then your selves Or can you expect to be obeyed by others when you will not obey the God of Heaven and Earth your selves We beseech you therefore for the sake of a poor distressed Land let our recovery begin with you God looks so much at the Rulers of a Nation in his dealings with them that ordinarily it goes with the people as their Rulers are Till David had numbered the people God would not let out his wrath upon them though it was they that were the great offenders If we see our Representative body begin in loathing themselves for all their iniquities and turning to the Lord with all their hearts we should yet believe that he is returning to us and will do us good after all our provocations Truly Gentlemen it is much from you that we must fetch our comfortable or sad prognosticks of the life or death of this diseased Land Whatever you do I know that it shall go well with the righteous but for the happiness or misery of the Nation in generall it 's you that are our best prognostication If you repent your selves and become a holy people to the Lord it promiseth us deliverance But if you harden your hearts and prove despisers of God and holiness it 's like to be our temporall and sure to be your eternall undoing if saving grace do not prevent it And I must needs tell you that if you be not brought to loath your selves it is not because there is no loathsome matter in you Did you see your inside you could not forbear it As I think it would somewhat abate the pride of the most curious Gallants if they did but see what a heap of flegme and filth and dung and perhaps crawling worms there is within them Much more should it make you loath your selves if you saw those sins that are a thousand times more odious And to instigate you hereunto let me further reason with you 1. You can easily loath an enemy and who hath been a greater enemy to any of you then your selves Another may injure you but no man can everlastingly undo you but your selves 2. You abhorre him that kills your dearest friends and it is you by your sins that have put to death the Lord of life 3. Who is it but your selves that hath robbed you of so much precious time and so much precious fruit of Ordinances and of all the mercies of the Lord 4. Who is it but your selves that hath brought you under Gods displeasure Poverty could not have made him loath you nor any thing besides your sins 5. Who wounded Conscience and hath raised all your doubts and fears was it not your sinfull selves 6. Who is it but your selves that hath brought you so neer the gulf of misery and endangered your eternall peace 7. Consider the loathsome nature of your sins and how then can you choose but loath your selves 1. It is the creatures rebellion or disobedience against the absolute universall Soveraign 2. It is the deformity of Gods noblest creature here on earth and the abusing of the most noble faculties 3. It is a stain so deep that nothing can wash out but the blood of Christ The flood that drowned a world of sinners did not wash
away their sins The fire that consumed the Sodomites did not consume their sins Hell it self can never end it and therefore shall have no end it self It dieth not with you when you die Though Churchyards are the guiltiest spots of ground they do not bury and hide our sin 4. The Church must loath it and must cast out the sinner as loathsome if he remain impenitent and none of the servants of the Lord must have any friendship with the unfruitfull works of darkness 5. God himself doth loath the creature for sin and for nothing else but sin Zech. 11. 8. My soul loathed them Deut. 32. 19. When the Lord saw it he abhorred them because of the provoking of his sons and daughters Lev. 26. 30. My soul shall abhorre you Psal. 78. 59. When God heard this he was wroth and greatly abhorred Israel Lam. 2. 7. He abhorred his very Sanctuary For he is of purer eyes then to behold iniquity Hab. 1. 13. In a word it is the sentence of God himself that a wicked man is loathsome and cometh to shame Prov. 13. 5. so that you see what abundant cause of self-abhorrence is among us But we are much afraid of Gods departure when we see how common self-love is in the world and how rare this penitent self-loathing is 1. Do they loath themselves that on every occasion are contending for their honour and exalting themselves and venturing their very souls to be highest in the world for a little while 2. Do they loath themselves that are readier to justifie all their sins or at least extenuate them then humbly confess them 3. Do they loath themselves for all their sins that cannot endure to be reproved but loath their friends and the Ministers of Christ that tell them of their loathsomness 4. Do they loath themselves that take their pride it self for manhood and Christian humility for baseness and brokenness of heart for whining hypocrisie or folly and call them a company of Priest-ridden fools that lament their sin and ease their souls by free confession Is the ruffling bravery of this City and the strange attyre the haughty carriage the feasting idleness and pomp the marks of such as loath themselves for all their abhominations why then was fasting and sack cloth and ashes the badg of such in ancient times 5. Do they loath themselves for all their sins who loath those that will not do as they and speak reproachfully of such as run not with them to the same excess of ryot 1 Pet. 4. 4. and count them precisians that dare not spit in the face of Christ by wilfull sinning as venturously and madly as themselves 6. Or do they loath themselves for all their sins that love their sins even better then their God and will not by all the obtestations and commands and intreaties of the Lord be perswaded to forsake them How farre all these are from this self-loathing and how farre that Nation is from happiness where the Rulers or inhabitants are such is easie to conjecture I should have minded you what sins of the Land must be remembred and loathed if we would have peace and healing But as the glass forbids me so alas as the sins of Sodom they declare themselves Though through the great mercy of the Lord the body of this Nation and the sober part have not been guilty of that Covenant-breaking perfidiousness treason sedition disobedience self-exalting and turbulencie as some have been and as ignorant forreigners through the calumnies of malicious adversaries may possibly believe yet must it be for a lamentation through all generations that any of those that went out from us have contracted the guilt of such abhominations and occasioned the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme and that any in the pride or simplicity of their hearts have followed the conduct of Jesuiticall seducers they knew not whither nor to what That Profaness aboundeth on the other side and drunkenness swearing fornication lasciviousness idleness pride and covetousness do still survive the Ministers that have wasted themselves against them and the labours of faithfull Magistrates to this day And that the two extreams of Heresie and Profaneness do increase each other and while they talk against each other they harden one another and both afflict the Church of Christ But especially woe to England for that crying sin the scorning of a holy life if a wonder of mercy do not save us That people professing the Christian Religion should scorn the diligent practise of that Religion which themselves profess That obedience to the God of Heaven that imitation of the example of our Saviour who came from Heaven to teach us Holiness should not only be neglected unreasonably and impiously neglected but also by a transcendent impious madness should be made a matter of reproach That the holy Ghost into whose name as the sanctifier these men were themselves baptized should not only be resisted but his sanctifying work be made a scorn That it should be made a matter of derision for a man to preferre his soul before his body and Heaven before earth and God before a transitory world and to use his reason in that for which it was principally given him and not to be wilfully mad in a case where madness will undo him unto all eternity judg as you are men whether hell it self is like much to exceed such horrid wickedness and whether it be not an astonishing wonder that ever a reasonable soul should be brought to such a height of abhomination That they that profess to believe the holy Catholike Church and the Communion of Saints should deride the holiness of the Church and the Saints and their communion that they that pray for the hallowing of Gods Name the coming of his Kingdom and the doing of his will even as it s done in Heaven should make a mock at all this that they pray for How much further think you is it possible for wicked souls to go in sinning Is it not the God of Heaven himself that they make a scorn of Is not Holiness his image Did not he make the Law that doth command it professing that none shall see his face without it Heb. 12. 14. O sinfull Nation O people laden with iniquity Repent Repent speedily and with self-loathing Repent of this inhumane crime lest God should take away your glory and enter himself into judgment with you and plead against you the scorn that you have cast upon the Creator the Saviour the sanctifier to whom you were engaged in your baptismall vows Lest when he plagueth and condemneth you he say Why persecuted you me Acts 9. 4. Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me Read Prov. 1. 20. to the end When Israel mocked the messengers of the Lord and despised his words and misused his Prophets his wrath arose against his people till there was no remedy 2 Chron. 26. 16. And O that you that are the
Physicions of this diseased Land would specially call them to Repentance for this and help them against it for the time to come Having called you first to Remember your misdoings and secondly to loath your selves in your own eyes for them I must add a third That you stop not here but proceed to Reformation or else all the rest is but hypocrisie And here it is that I most earnestly intreat this Honourable Assembly for their best assistance O make not the forementioned sins your own lest you hear from God quod minus crimine quam absolutione peccatum est Though England hath been used to cry loud for liberty let them not have liberty to abuse their Maker and to damn their souls if you can hinder it Optimus est reipublicae status ubi nulla libertas deest nisi licentia pereundi as Nero once was told by his unsuccessfull Tutor Use not men to a liberty of scorning the Laws of God lest you teach them to scorn yours For can you expect to be better used then God And cui plus licet quam par est plus vult quam licet Gell. l. 17. c. 14. We have all seen the evils of Liberty to be wanton in Religion Is it not worse to have Liberty to deride Religion If men shall have leave to go quietly to hell themselves let them not have leave to mock poor souls from Heaven The suffering to the sound in faith is as nothing for what is the foaming rage of mad men to be regarded But that in England God should be so provoked and souls so hindered from the pathes of life that whoever will be converted and saved must be made a laughing stock which carnall mindes cannot endure this is the mischief which we deprecate The eyes of the Nation and of the Christian world are much upon you some high in hopes some deep in fears some waiting in dubious expectations for the issue of your counsels Great expectations in deep necessities should awake you to the greatest care and diligence Though I would not by omitting any necessary directions or admonitions to you invite the world to think that I speak to such as cannot endure to hear and that so Honourable an Assembly doth call the Ministers of Christ to do those works of their proper office which yet they will be offended if they do yet had I rather erre in the defective part then by excess and therefore shall not presume to be too particular Only in generall in the Name of Christ and on the behalf of a trembling yet hoping Nation I most earnestly beseech and warn you that you own and promote the power and practise of Godliness in the Land and that as God whose Ministers you are Rom. 13. 4. is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek him Heb. 11. 6. and hath made this a principall Article of our Faith so you would imitate your absolute Lord and honour them that fear the Lord and encourage them that diligently seek him And may I not freely tell you that God should have the precedencie and that you must first seek his Kingdom and the Righteousness thereof and he will facilitate all the rest of your work Surely no Powers on earth should be offended that the God from whom and for whom and through whom they have what they have is preferred before them when they should own no interest but his and what is subservient to it I have long thought that pretences of a necessity of beginning with our own affairs hath frustrated our hopes from many Parliaments already and I am sure that by delayes the enemies of our peace have got advantage to cross our ends and attain their own Our calamities begun in differences about Religion and still that 's the wound that most needs closing and if that were done how easily I dare confidently speak it would the generality of sober godly people be agreed in things civill and become the strength and glory of the Soveraign under God And though with grief and shame we see this work so long undone may we hope that God hath reserved it to this season Yet I have the confidence to profess that as the exalting of one party by the ejection and persecuting of the rest is the sinfull way to your dishonour and our ruine so the termes on which the differing parties most considerable among us may safely easily and suddenly unite are very obvious and our concord a very easie thing if the prudent and moderate might be the guides and selfish interests and passion did not set us at a further distance then our principles have done And to shew you the facility of such an agreement were it not that such personall matters are much liable to misinterpretations I should tell you that the late Reverend Primate of Ireland consented in less than half an hoursdebate to five or six Propositions which I offered him as sufficient for the Concord of the moderate Episcopall and Presbyterians without forsaking the Principles of their Parties O that the Lord would yet shew so much mercy to a sinfull Nation as to put it into your hearts to promote but the practise of those Christian principles which we are all agreed in I hope there is no controversie among us whether God should be obeyed and hell avoided and Heaven first sought and Scripture be the rule and test of our Religion and sin abhorred and cast out O that you would but further the practise of this with all your might We crave not of you any Lordship or dominion nor riches nor interest in your temporall affairs we had rather see a Law to exclude all Ecclesiasticks from all power of force The God of Heaven that will judg you and us will be a righteous Judg betwixt us whether we crave any thing unreasonable at your hands These are the summe of our requests 1. That Holiness may be encouraged and the overspreading prophaneness of this Nation effectually kept down 2. That an able diligent Ministry may be encouraged and not corrupted by temporall power 3. That Discipline may be seriously promoted and Ministers no more hindred by Magistrates in the exercise of their office then Physicions and Schoolmasters are in theirs seeing it is but a Government like theirs consisting in the liberty of conscionable managing the works of our own office that we expect Give us but leave to labour in Christs Vineyard with such encouragement as the necessity of obstinate souls requireth and we will ask no more You have less cause to restrain us from discipline then from preaching for it is a more flesh-displeasing work that we are hardlier brought to I foretell you that you shut out me and all that are of my minde if you would force us to administer Sacraments without Discipline and without the conduct of our own discretion to whom the Magistrate appoints it as if a Physicion must give no Physick but by your prescript The antidisciplinarian Magistrate I could as resolutely